How To Finance A Neo-Nazi Site: Work For A School For Black Kids

Heidi Beirich at the SPLC’s Hatewatch has a remarkable story about how an online outfit like the leading white supremacist website, Stormfront, run by the notorious Don Black, has been able to keep afloat all these years. Turn out that it’s largely through the employment of Black’s wife — herself a longtime white supremacist (being also David Duke’s ex) — by a company that runs a charter school dedicated to educating underprivileged black children — for which she’s doing the publicity:

There is no evidence that Emilia Fanjul, who married decades ago into what the Palm Beach Post has described as the country’s best-known and wealthiest Cuban-American family, or other family members had any inkling as to Chloe Black’s background.

Black, who lives in West Palm Beach just a few miles from the Fanjuls’ Palm Beach mansion, also works as an “executive assistant” in the executive suite of Florida Crystals, where the Fanjul family’s sugar conglomerate is headquartered. …

The irony of Chloe Black doing public relations work for a school explicitly aimed at lifting black and Latino children out of poverty is hard to miss. While less visible in the white supremacist world than either of her husbands, Black has a strong movement history of her own. She met Duke at a college meeting of the White Youth Alliance in the 1970s, and, after marrying him, became vice president of his Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. She long held the copyright to African Atto, a weird 1973 booklet that instructs blacks on how to kill whites — and which was written, as was revealed by enterprising reporters, by Duke, who then claimed he was using it to compile a list of “radical blacks.” Although Chloe divorced Duke in 1984, four years later she married Don Black — a man who had only recently emerged from prison after serving time for plotting to invade a black-run Caribbean island.

Moreover, it seems that Black is largely operating off of his wife’s income:

But Don Black — who lives and operates Stormfront out of a house owned entirely by Chloe and valued at about half a million dollars — is apparently unemployed, although he claims to do some Internet consulting work. He solicits contributions to the Stormfront site, but says he draws no salary from the operation and has, according to an official Stormfront posting, “financed much of Stormfront’s growth out of pocket, personally.” The website is believed to be at least partly supported by the salary that Florida Crystals pays Chloe Black.

David Neiwert

David Neiwert is the managing editor of Firedoglake. He's a freelance journalist based in Seattle and the author/editor of the blog Orcinus. He also is the author of Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community (Palgrave/St. Martin's Press, June 2005), as well as Death on the Fourth of July: The Story of a Killing, a Trial, and Hate Crime in America (Palgrave/St. Martin's, 2004), and In God's Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest (1999, WSU Press). His reportage for MSNBC.com on domestic terrorism won the National Press Club Award for Distinguished Online Journalism in 2000.